When a girl is four, her mother clips all of the her hair off. Once it grows back, while braiding her hair, she finds a single dead snake tangled with her hair in the comb her mother used. Her hair is made of snakes that whisper to the woman. As a thirteen-year-old, she becomes envious of the straightened hair of the first Black Miss America and goes to a salon to get chemical straightening done to her hair. Although the salon workers praise the woman as beautiful, the relaxer poisons the snakes and eviscerates the woman's scalp.

As the woman grows up, she catches the attention of several boys and men. The snakes defend the woman from the men's sexual intentions. At twenty-six, the woman stops using relaxers and her snakes take on a buoyant and vigorous life, singing and roaming on her head. The snakes are a powerful entity that have followed African diasporic people to the West since slavery as protectors. Now that her snakes are free from the poisoning relaxers, the woman begins to see the snakes of other Black people in her life, and appreciates their power and history.